Insider trading tracker: follow Form 4 buys and get alerts

An insider trading tracker collects the Form 4 reports that a public company's officers, directors and 10% owners file with the SEC when they buy or sell its stock. Free screeners let you browse every filing; for a short alert on only the trades you care about, our pick is AyeWatch, an AI monitor that reads the filings for you and sends a summary with the link.

What every insider trading tracker reads

Section 16 of the Securities Exchange Act covers a company's directors, its officers and anyone holding more than 10% of a registered class of its stock. These insiders report most trades in the company's equity to the SEC, and a Form 4 is due before the end of the second business day after the trade. Filing happens electronically on EDGAR, so the raw data is public and free.

So every tracker starts from the same documents. What differs is how much of the pile it shows you, because most Form 4 lines are not someone deciding to buy. The form's own transaction codes tell them apart:

• P: open market or private purchase
• S: open market or private sale
• A: grant or award from the company
• M: exercise of an option or another derivative
• F: shares withheld to pay tax or an exercise price
• G: a gift

Since April 2023, a filer also ticks a box when a trade ran under a Rule 10b5-1 plan, a schedule set in advance. A tracker that alerts on every code will mostly ping you about payroll.

Two kinds of tracker

The SEC says it has no email notification service for EDGAR filings, only RSS on some searches, so a push alert has to come from somewhere else.

Set up an insider trading tracker in AyeWatch

1. Open the investors setup and start an internet monitor.
2. Write the rule the way you would brief an analyst:

Alert me when the CEO, CFO or a director of these five companies files a Form 4 with an open-market purchase over $100,000. Skip grants, option exercises, gifts and 10b5-1 plan trades.

3. If you also want the filing page itself watched, paste the company's EDGAR filings list filtered to form type 4.
4. Pick where alerts land. Push and the in-app feed come with every plan; paid plans add email, Slack, Discord, webhooks and the API.

Each alert carries a short summary and its sources, so the Form 4 is one tap away. AyeWatch can watch the same company's 8-Ks and news in the same feed if you add them. Paid plans start at $9 a month and bill in monitoring credits; the free preview needs no card.

When a screener is the better tool

If you want to browse the whole market, spot cluster buys at companies you have never heard of, or sort years of trades, OpenInsider does that for free, and AyeWatch does not try to: it has no screener, no history tables and no trade database of its own. Plenty of people use a screener for discovery and AyeWatch for the names they already hold.

Read the filing before you read into it

A purchase tells you an insider bought. It does not tell you why, or what the stock will do next. Check the code, the price, the shares owned after the trade and the 10b5-1 box before drawing any conclusion. This guide is general information about public filings, not investment advice.